Phoebe North: Starglass

That night they invaded our quarters. I’d never seen our home so full of people before. Busy and crowded, it felt completely alien. Pepper seemed to agree with me. He ducked behind the bath basin, crouched down beneath the tangle of pipes, and refused to come out.

I couldn’t hide. It was my job to take the kugels and pies and tuck them away into our icebox. But I decided that I didn’t have to be nice about it. I pushed out my lower lip, sulked and stomped. I knew my father’s eyes were on me as I snatched a tray of salted meats from Giveret Schneider’s hands. But Abba wasn’t the one who had to rearrange all the shelves in the icebox to make room.

I wanted them all to leave us alone, but they wouldn’t. They mingled and joked and then grew silent again, as if they suddenly remembered why they were there. I glared at them from my place in the corner. I watched as Abba’s family crowded around him, ignoring me. It had been years since we’d seen them last, not since Grandpa Fineberg had twisted Ronen’s arm as a punishment for feeding their dog table scraps. Momma had refused to visit them after that, but now that she was gone, they had no reason to stay away.

Ronen sat on the stairwell, making out with Hannah Meyer. Since they’d turned sixteen, she’d been hanging around more and more. Her parents had come too, and though they weren’t wearing their gold-threaded cords, you could tell that they were Council members. It was the way her father held himself, posture stiff and proud. Abba saw it too. When they came in, he practically fell over himself trying to shake the man’s hand. Momma would have laughed at that. I could almost hear her voice in my ears.

Arran, you’re such a suck-up.

But there was one visitor he ignored. Mar Jacobi, the librarian. He was a small, copper-skinned man, serious-looking, and he wandered in through the front door holding a tin in his hand and looking lost.

“I’ll take that,” I said, scrambling up from my chair when I realized no one else would. The corners of his eyes went all crinkly. He bowed his head.

“Thank you, Terra,” he said. I tensed at his words. Before that day, we’d only ever spoken at the library’s checkout counter. And even then our words had been polite—perfunctory. “Hello,” and “This is when they’re due,” and all of that. But now he held out the tin for me. “I brought you macaroons. Chocolate. Alyana told me they were your favorite.”

“I didn’t realize you knew Momma,” I said, taking the tin from him. The metal box had been recycled many times, rust ringing the edges. The glue seemed hardly strong enough to hold the label down. I tugged on one of the loose ends of the paper, lifting wary eyes to the librarian. His smile was small, strained.

“I certainly did.”

But it didn’t make sense. He didn’t fit into our tiny galley, packed with familiar mourners. He floated around alone while Momma’s bakery coworkers drank all the wine they’d brought for Abba, and while Rachel came in and sat with me, holding my hand and gossiping about the other girls from school. Mar Jacobi stood there with a plate in his hands, stirring the food around and not eating anything. And then, when people began to leave, yawning their apologies once again, the librarian stayed, sitting across from us at our galley table.

“I don’t know why they keep saying they’re sorry,” I said to him at last, eager to plug up the silence that had begun to fill our home. “It’s not like it’s their fault Momma died.”

The librarian lifted the corners of his mouth, quietly amused. But Abba didn’t find it funny.

“Terra,” he said. “It’s time for you to go up to bed.”

“Ronen gets to stay up!”

My brother had slipped out with Hannah, his arm draped over her shoulders. But Abba wasn’t hearing any of it. He only shook his head. “Your brother is sixteen, a man. He can stay up as late as he wants. You’re still a child.”

Mar Jacobi’s eyebrows were knitted up, but he didn’t argue with Abba. I pushed my chair away from the table, huffing.

“Momma would let me . . .,” I started. Hearing my father’s silence answer me, I winced.

“Sorry,” I muttered. My father’s hard gaze softened. Still, he urged me toward the stairwell with a tilt of his chin.

“Bed, Terra,” he said.

I pulled myself up the stairs. When I reached the dark second story, I stopped, my hand curled around the banister. It felt like I had broken some sort of sacred rule, reminding Abba that Momma was gone.

Gone , I said to myself. Gone. And then I began to wonder whether she felt anything now that she was dead. Maybe she just stared into the empty darkness of the atrium, a darkness not so different from the one that waited for me in my windowless bedroom.

I shuddered at the thought of it—an endless black so dark that sometimes you couldn’t even tell if your eyes were open or closed. Meanwhile the warm light of our galley flooded the metal wall along the stairwell. I couldn’t bring myself to face the darkness. I sat down at the top of the stairs, holding my head in my hands. Pepper crept out of the bathroom to curl up at my side. I tucked my hand against his soft belly, listening to the men talk.

“She’s a good girl,” Mar Jacobi said. I sat forward at the words, desperate to hear what they were saying about me. “There’s much of her mother in her.”

My dad let out a snort of disagreement. “Alyana wasn’t so good.”

“No?”

“No, not good. Kind. But you knew that.” Another pause. When my father’s voice came again, it was garbled. He wasn’t crying. But he was closer than I’d ever heard him. “She was mine.”

“I’m so sorry, Arran.”

My father kept talking as if the librarian hadn’t said a word. “All these years of mitzvot, all these years of working up in that clock tower alone, doing my duty. I’m a good man, Benjamin. But what has it brought me?”

“You’ll reach Zehava. Only four more years. Then we’ll be rid of this ship.”

“I’ll be alone.” My father’s tone wasn’t wistful or sad. He said it like it was a simple fact, like there would be no arguing with him. I knew that tone all too well, even at twelve. “Alone, Benjamin. Alone.”

“You have your children. Your daughter. Your son.”

Another snort. “Ronen’s all but ready to declare his intentions to the cartographer girl. He won’t be living with me for more than a season. If it weren’t for Terra, I’d . . .”

“Arran.” There was a warning in Mar Jacobi’s voice. “You’ll take care of your daughter until she’s grown. You’ll do your duty so that she can join you on Zehava. It’s what our forefathers wanted. What Alyana wanted. It’s why you’re here.”

Chair legs squealed against the scuffed metal floor. I tensed, afraid that my father was coming close. But his voice went to the far end of the galley instead.

“A burden,” my father said. “That’s what she is. Trouble. Like her mother.”

My stomach lurched. I bent forward, pressing my face to my knees, and squeezed my eyes shut. I could see stars against my eyelids, but they didn’t distract me from the pain that I felt.

I heard the slosh of liquid then as my father spilled wine into a cup. There was a long pause, then a crash as he slammed his tumbler back down on the countertop. He filled it again.

When he spoke at last, his voice had hardened. “Leave me, librarian,” he said. “Leave me to my grief.”

I didn’t wait to hear Mar Jacobi’s reply. I knew that my father would soon come stomping up the stairs. He was going to slam his bedroom door, blocking out the world. And I didn’t intend to get in his way. I knew what would happen if he found me here, still awake. There would be yelling, and lots of it.